This invention generally relates to measuring and improving speech intelligibility in an enclosure or an indoor environment. More particularly, embodiments of this invention relate to accurately estimating and improving the speech intelligibility from a loudspeaker in an enclosure.
Ensuring intelligibility of loudspeaker signals in an enclosure in the presence of time-varying noise is a challenge. In a vehicle or a train or an airplane, interference may come from many sources including engine noise, fan noise, road noise, railway track noise, babble noise, and other transient noises. In an indoor environment, interference may come from many sources including a music system, television, babble noise, refrigerator hum, washing machine, lawn mower, printer, and vacuum cleaner.
Accurately estimating the intelligibility of the loudspeaker signal in the presence of noise is critical when modifying the signal in order to improve its intelligibility. Additionally, the way the signal is modified also makes a big difference in performance and computational complexity. There is a need for an audio intelligibility enhancement system that is sensitive, accurate, works well even in low loudspeaker-power constraints, and has low computational complexity.
It will be appreciated that these systems and methods are novel, as are applications thereof and many of the components, systems, methods and algorithms employed and included therein. It should be appreciated that embodiments of the presently described inventive body of work can be implemented in numerous ways, including as processes, apparata, systems, devices, methods, computer readable media, computational algorithms, embedded or distributed software and/or as a combination thereof. Several illustrative embodiments are described below.